Business Ethics Blog Posts 8-3-2016 Is Trump Dropping Out Edition

If Trump withdraws from the presidential race, the responsibility for choosing his replacement will fall to the RNC. (That’s the Republican National Committee, made up of about two hundred party leaders, not the Republican National Convention, made up of thousands of delegates. The Committee could theoretically reconvene the Convention to hold the vote, but they won’t.)

So the Republican National Committee would get together somewhere, and elect a new nominee. This would likely be Mike Pence, since he’s the veep nominee—picking anyone else would divide the party further, and that’s the last thing they’ll want in the wake of a Trump schism. Pence isn’t widely hated, and putting him in the slot could be framed as a pro-forma thing, so that’s what they’d be most likely to do.

When the Trump train grinds to a halt, mainstream outlets will see more lost funding and more layoffs, leading to poor coverage of the new administration and an even more fractured political discourse. The media has learned that the exploitation of violence, riots, and bigotry brings clicks and cash. This is not a new lesson — as the old saying goes, “if it bleeds, it leads” — but the 2016 campaign has shown the mainstreaming of extremism to be uniquely lucrative. As the two disaffected white fan bases described above lash out at Clinton, her supporters, and non-white citizens, we should expect these men to be portrayed as one of two equally legitimate “sides” — not as a threat to the safety of other Americans, but as a mainstream perspective. As with Trump, the shock will eventually fade, and continual exposure to extremist views will make it harder for Americans to recognize them as such.

The emphasis on diversity and identity politics reflects the extent to which the Democratic Party has become the party of the well-off professional class. For party leaders, it’s easier to target voters on pure identity than it is on class, because the former doesn’t impede the neoliberal economic order to which Democrats have been utterly complacent. Of course, this isn’t really a problem for people who are well-off, because people who are well-off have the luxury of focusing solely on identity politics. Meanwhile, the vast majority who aren’t well-off must resort to identity politics (see: God and guns) because their economic concerns are of ZERO concern to the professional political classes in both parties.

Trump probably wasn’t deliberately referencing the most famous joke in Zoolander when he demonstrated his ignorance of/contempt for the distinction between adjectives and adverbs.

Not knowing the difference between doing good and doing well is more than a grammatical error – it is a severe ethical and imaginative failing as well. It’s possible to re-organise the English language to reduce or amplify the number of parts of speech. Horne Tooke, in the eighteenth century, thought that only nouns and verbs were essential categories, and every other part of speech was merely a contraction of what might be a periphrastic application of nouns and verbs. But Horne Tooke, eloquent writer that he was, still knew the difference between describing a thing and describing an action.

It’s hard to believe that these dairies will expose even more hideous crimes committed by Himmler (although it is possible). But their main value lies in the hope that they will help shed light on one of the world’s most revolting crimes against humanity.